Traditional printing devices rely on a mechanically operated carriage to transport a print head in a linear direction as other mechanics advance a print medium in an orthogonal direction. As the print head moves over the print medium an image may be laid down. Portable printers have been developed through technologies that reduce the size of the operating mechanics. However, the principles of providing relative movement between the print head and print medium remain the same as traditional printing devices. Accordingly, these mechanics limit the reduction of size of the printer as well as the material that may be used as the print medium.
Handheld printing devices have been developed that ostensibly allow an operator to manipulate a handheld device over a print medium in order to print an image onto the medium. However, these devices are challenged by the unpredictable and nonlinear movement of the device by the operator. The variations of operator movement make it difficult to determine the precise location of the print head. This type of positioning error may have deleterious effects of the quality of the printed image. This is especially the case for relatively large print jobs, as the positioning error may accumulate in a compounded manner over the entire print operation.
Digital image capture devices (cameras) and print solutions (printer) have been implemented with a physical separation of the digital image capture device and the printer device. The digital image capture device is required to transfer the digital image via a wired connection, media cards, or wirelessly to a printer.
Concepts have been proposed that integrate a small print mechanism within the body of a camera or a camera enabled cell phone. The integration of the smaller print mechanism into a camera or cell phone that captures digital images limits the printed image size and/or increases the overall image size of the image capture device.
While Polaroid® cameras have provided integrated capture and hardcopy solutions based on a unique paper cartridge/cassette that is installed into a more traditional film camera, this combination camera solution has a limited hardcopy picture size, determined by the size of the paper cartridge that may be contained in the camera. A second drawback is that the image is only available as hardcopy, not electronic. There is no method to create multiple high quality images or re-create the original image, except by manual scanning the hardcopy image